Monday, October 15, 2012

"A Post Whose Title I Can No Longer Remember - The Sequel"

A ten year-old (stepdaughter) Rachel is passenging in a car
driven by her mother, as they pass the Department Store, Robinson’s.

“How did that store Robinson’s
get it name?” she inquires.

“It was named after the store’s founder, whose name was
Robinson,” replies her mother.

“No!” roars back Rachel, in disbelief.“It was named after a person!”

You can imagine little Rachel’s even greater dismay when she
learned that the same rationale was behind the naming of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Penney’s and Neiman-Marcus, the latter named for two people.

A child’s innocence aside, it is not unusual for retail
emporia to bear the names of their founders.It may surprise you , however, to learn that the “Name Game” goes even
further than that.Everyday actions and
activities are also named after their
originators.

The name of nineteenth-century Massachusetts Governor Edbridge Gerry is forever linked to the
process by which voting districts are strategically configured to attain a
desired electoral result, the activity known even to this day as Gerry-mandering.

Franz Mesmer, an
early theorist in studies related to hypnosis is represented by the still
current descriptive, “mesmerizing.”

It is also a fact that the (Northern, and not very good) Civil
War general Ambrose Burnside – they
flipped it around but it’s unquestionably the guy – originated, or at least greatly
popularized, the hairstyle accessory known as sideburns.

And then there's General Hooker.

These are precedents, demonstrating that words in common
usage – or at least we’ve heard of
them – derive, not only from ancient languages like Latin, but also from the behaviors
or characteristics of (once) living and breathing people.

With the strength of the foregoing evidence as precedent, scoff
not too easily, as we chronicle the following:

Auguste Mirage –
“Now you see him, now you don’t.”

Albert Miniscule,
a fully-grown man was one foot eleven inches tall.

Theodore Stumble
could not walk ten feet without losing his footing and toppling to the ground.

Horatio Fumpher –
“It sounds like English, but I
cannot, for the life of me, make out what he’s saying.”

There was this miscreant, I believe, Irish family, who were notorious for skipping out without paying
their rent.The name of this absconding family:The Skeedaddles.

Annabelle Hussy –
“Melinda-Fay Weatherby, you are a brazen hussy!”“Are you saying I’m like Annabelle?”“You’re worse!Future generations will reward your disreputable behavior by forever
describing it as Weatherbish!”

Anatole Suffoc was
the first person known to have done in a loved one by pressing a pillow over
their face.From then on, anyone
dispatched in a similar fashioned was determined to have been Suffoc-ated.

Elwood Flabbergast – was
so “flabbergasted” by indoor
plumbing, food had to be brought to him, while he stood over the newly installed
apparatus and continued to flush.

During Prohibition, Gus
Bootlegger was the first lawbreaker to smuggle contraband “hooch” in from
Montreal.

A family whose troublesome children are obstreperous and
rude – Meet the Whippersnappers.

Marilu Pester
simply would not leave people alone.

"High hopes followed by thudding disappointments" delineates the sorry history of Jeremy Fizzle.Every plan and project inevitably“fizzled”
out.

The Lollygaggers,
of Biloxi Mississippi, finished first in a national “Taking Forever To Get
Someplace” contest, narrowly defeating the Meanderers
of Pierre, South Dakota.One Sunday
morning, it took the Lollygag family
an astonishing three hours to walk from their home to their church, a distance
of less than two-and-a-half blocks. (The
Lollygaggers placed the blame for
their snail-like progress on the Chatterboxes
whom they ran into along the way.But
many believe they were deliberately going for the record.)

More to come when I think of them – I mean, when I assiduously
uncover them in my research.

3 comments:

"By 1934, (Jimmy Durante) had a major record hit with his own novelty composition, "Inka Dinka Doo," the lyrics of which were written by Ben Ryan[4] to music that Durante himself composed. It became his theme song for the rest of his life. A year later, Durante starred on Broadway in the Billy Rose stage musical Jumbo, in which a police officer stopped him while leading a live elephant and asked him, "What are you doing with that elephant?" Durante's reply, "What elephant?" was a regular show-stopper. This comedy bit, also reprised in his role in Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962, based on the 1935 musical) is likely to have contributed to the popularity of the idiom 'the elephant in the room.'"